Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Communications networks are generally packet-switched networks that operate based on Internet Protocol (IP). When one endpoint (e.g., host) has data to send to another endpoint, the data may be transmitted as a series of packets. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a transport layer protocol that offers reliable data transfer between two endpoints. TCP is connection-oriented protocol that requires endpoints to establish a connection before data transfer occurs. Although widely implemented, TCP is designed to ensure that data is delivered according to a particular order from one endpoint to another, which may not be optimal for network throughput and resource utilization.